Page 76 - the-scarlet-pimpernel

door. She had been young, misguided, ill-advised perhaps.
Armand knew that: her impulses and imprudence, knew it
still better; but Blakeney was slow-witted, he would not lis-
ten to ‘circumstances,’ he only clung to facts, and these had
shown him Lady Blakeney denouncing a fellow man to a
tribunal that knew no pardon: and the contempt he would
feel for the deed she had done, however unwittingly, would
kill that same love in him, in which sympathy and intellec-
tuality could never had a part.
Yet even now, his own sister puzzled him. Life and love
have such strange vagaries. Could it be that with the wan-
ing of her husband’s love, Marguerite’s heart had awakened
with love for him? Strange extremes meet in love’s pathway:
this woman, who had had half intellectual Europe at her
feet, might perhaps have set her affections on a fool. Mar-
guerite was gazing out towards the sunset. Armand could
not see her face, but presently it seemed to him that some-
thing which glittered for a moment in the golden evening
light, fell from her eyes onto her dainty fichu of lace.
But he could not broach that subject with her. He knew
her strange, passionate nature so well, and knew that re-
serve which lurked behind her frank, open ways. The had
always been together, these two, for their parents had died
when Armand was still a youth, and Marguerite but a child.
He, some eight years her senior, had watched over her un-
til her marriage; had chaperoned her during those brilliant
years spent in the flat of the Rue de Richelieu, and had seen
her enter upon this new life of hers, here in England, with
much sorrow and some foreboding.